Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

The vital importance of the regulation framework to trigger the development of a PV market has been recognized these last few years in many European countries. For policymakers today, one of the key challenges is making the best choice to initiate and stimulate PV markets. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, EPIA has launched the PV Observatory initiative. This paper describes this new initiative, which aims at analyzing the current state of regulatory frameworks in a set of countries, starting with the main European PV markets.

As 2009 comes to a close, many equipment suppliers are reflecting on the fact that the photovoltaic industry, despite its huge growth potential, can be a brutal place to do business. In the first half of the year many equipment suppliers had the unnerving experience of falling off a cliff, going from record order levels to no orders at all in the space of a few months. This sobering moment served as a reminder that the PV industry needs both access to finance and government support to continue growing. Indeed, it should be remembered that photovoltaics would still only be an interesting technology serving niche markets were it not for government subsidies. The one good thing about this year has been the accelerated drop in cell and panel prices. This is bringing ever closer the day when the price of PV generated electricity reaches parity with electricity generated from non-renewable sources and subsidies are no longer required. It is also driving a new round of investment in more efficient manufacturing equipment.

Solar currently represents less than 0.5% of global electricity generation. However, as renewable electricity gains importance in the US$1 trillion global electricity market, we forecast solar photovoltaic shipments to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 50% for the next four years. We expect an increasing number of countries to promote solar energy as the cost gap between solar and fossil fuel-generated electricity closes. This paper provides an overview of what to expect from the PV market in 2010.

The global PV market is undergoing fundamental change. According to a new survey by EuPD Research, Germany is once again the most important PV sales market worldwide this year. Current market conditions are tightening, but within Germany there is still plenty of undiscovered potential. The transformation of the PV market from a supply-driven sellers' market to a demand-driven buyers' market is, however, an accelerated process rather than a slow development.

This article will look at what trends can be gleaned from patent application publication figures of the past decade in the sector of PV technology. The study looks at the number of patent applications in PV technology published worldwide between 1999 and 2008. The data will show in which regions and countries patent protection is being sought. The figures are taken from patent documentation databases developed by the European Patent Office (EPO) and Japan Patent Office or databases used worldwide and available at the EPO, and they are retrieved mostly using patent classification schemes. The article also provides a brief overview of the role of the EPO and what companies, researchers and individual inventors should keep in mind when applying for a European patent.

Despite over 30 years of unprofitability, being viewed as too expensive and in many cases, unattractive, the PV industry has also enjoyed over 30 years of strong growth. Though granted, in the past, this growth was often from a much smaller base than the gigawatt levels experienced today, it is still an impressive achievement. Table 1 provides a history of PV industry growth from 1978 to the present. The data in Table 1 is based on what was sold into the global market to the first point of sale, eliminating double shipment (sales) of technology.

In 2008, the global PV market reached 5.6GW and the cumulative PV power installed totalled almost 15GW compared to 9GW in 2007. Spain represented almost half of the new installations in 2008 with about 2.5GW, followed by Germany with 1.5GW additional connected systems. USA confirmed its trend with 342MW newly installed PV systems, followed by South Korea which registered 274MW of PV installations over the year.

The continued tight supply and high cost of polysilicon, coinciding with the growth in demand for solar energy, has been a key catalyst for the rapid adoption of thin-film technologies in the last two years. Although the technology has been in development for over 15 years, it is only now that thin film has emerged as a viable low cost-per-watt alternative to conventional crystalline silicon cells.

Standards have traditionally been used in other industries, especially semiconductor, to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. This article will illustrate these efforts, as well as acting as a call for participation to become involved in SEMI’s standardization developments for PV. Four active task forces have been initiated to tackle these muchneeded standards for the PV industry, namely, the Analytical Test Methods Task Force; the PV Equipment Interface Specification Task Force; the PV Gases and Chemical Purity Task Force; and the PV Facilities Task Force.

Three buzzwords dominate the discussion about the future of the photovoltaic market in the U.S. right now: ITC (investment tax credit), credit crunch, and Obama. All three have the potential to shape how the solar industry will look in the next decades.